40,000 M9 Downloads In First Week

Friday September 3rd, 1999

Chris Hofmann of mozilla.org writes, "70,000 folks actually downloaded during the 5 weeks M8 was available and 40,000 people have already download M9 in the first week the milestone has been available.

The trend of people downloading, getting interested,
and getting plugged in to mozilla and mozillazine seems
to continue on an upward spiral.

I talked to the guy from Be (Duncan Wilcox), and he says they have yet to get M9 running on BeOS at all...Oh well, I guess we can stick with the much more stable and faster Opera and Netpositve and live without XML or whatever...

According to the .builds group, BeOS has a problem building Gecko because it lacks the ability to do something just about every other modern OS can (i.e. link with a library at runtime that it doesn't link with at build time). OpenVMS has a similar problem.

Now I don't mean to start a flame war here, but surely this puts BeOS in a bad light, not Mozilla?

Right on. I've started to try nighlty builds since I found a local (faaaast) mirror, near my workstation at the lab. And the nightly builds look amazing, definitely much more superior to the M9 build. Speed is incredible, and the usability in Linux has improved tremendously (no more blurring when scrolling with the arrows, for example). Every day things only get better. Go Mozilla! :-) (If only they'd fix the Dynamic HTML in Linux, I'd be a happy guy. :-) Gecko's Realm works, but no animation is displayed when rendering the page. All fine under Win32.)

Yes, I'm using a pre M10, and It is the very first usable for browsing :-) Good Work, I expect things to go better. A *fundamental* thing is that Mozilla support full and standard CSS 1, and some CSS 2.
Yuri

I've seen people (maybe here or elsewhere) say that M9 was not that good and even that older milestones were better, but I d/l'd the source the other day. It built first time and is easily the best Moz yet.

I agree, M9 is the best one yet. I've had trouble with previous milestones where they won't even load all the images completely and the back and forward buttons responding horribly (although they are still a bit buggy in M9). I don't have that problem with M9 and I'm looking forward to M11 . . . hell I want Netscape 5 now!

Don't know where people got the
idea that M9 "was not that good" -
I'd actually say that that title
should go to M8, which I found
quite disappointing (slow, loads
of crashes etc.). M9, on the other
hand, is *far* better than M8 - it's actually looking like a "real" browser for the first time.

One thing though (mentioned a week or two ago on MozillaZine) - I think the Mozilla folks should build an *optimised* version and put that up as well as the debug ones (i.e. no DOS window/messages, no debug code and everything compiled with -O). That way, we can get a better feel about the final Mozilla is going to perform.

Oh, and I second that request for proxy support - this is a pretty crucial feature of any browser and I'm surprised we're only a few months away from beta and still no proxying !

I followed the other milestone releases basically in a download-compile-browse-crash-forget fashion, and I intended to do the same with M9. Well, I have gone to several sites that used to crash Mozilla, and M9 didn't crash. It's a lot more stable, I like it a lot. Mozilla rules. My congratulations to the developers.

Be great if there was a "try Mozilla now" icon, like the Get Netscape now" icon. I have one on my site and would be happy to put a mozilla version there too as I get loads o traffic. Also get a lot of questions on where best to get Moz info as its a developer site.

That is a really good point. I don't have many viewers on my site, but still- the idea of a "test mozilla now" button on my site would be nice. (Of course, my X is broken, so I'm posting from lynx, but still :))